Progress in Month 2: Twice as Fun, Twice as Challenging

Class sizes in Khud's partner schools have once again stabilized after the student’s week long holiday. After reviewing what they taught before Eid, the mentors are now advancing the class into more esoteric waters as the class moves into its second month.

Danish’s class has started working with Videos after discovering the software with slideshows. “We’re learning how to add subtitles now”, tells me Danish. Subtitles are especially helpful for these kids because it leads to greater exposure on the internet since English is the most ubiquitous language on the internet. The next project for the students is an assignment where they will shoot their own videos and edit them on their own. For this project they will work in groups where they take turns, making scripts, managing the cameras and editing the story.

Danish noticing one of his students finding videos from the internet

Annie teaches her class how to Graphic Design and they often start the week with animated short films. This week they watched Pixar’s Piper, a 6 minute short film where piper the bird comes to term with her fear of the tide. Annie encouraged the kids to search the web for tools designers could use before introducing them to Adobe illustrator and Photoshop. “The class has a tendency to lose interest when I focuses too much on theory so I’m trying to introduce more and more practical assignments”, describes Annie.

Students working on their Graphic Design Assignment

Zoha’s class has now started their Content Authority tier of the 2 tier two month long class. Using research from leading universities the class is learning to overcome misleading and sometimes wholly false content on the internet. The class is doing ‘homepage analysis’ and ‘picture analysis’ where they go over examples of true and false content on the internet. “They show me what they’ve learned by visualizing it on MS paint. I could make them write it but I feel many students are still uncomfortable with writing and start to unnecessarily fall behind” notes Zoha.